This was a very lively meeting. We were 9 people, including three students from the La Salle Graduate Program.
We covered a lot of topics. Shawn shared some of his experiences while training in the fire fighter academy to become a fireman. He graduated first in his class and would like to become a captain or lieutenant, but he will have to work on his fluency to achieve it.
Mitch shared information about the International Stuttering Association (ISA) Newsletter, in which he has published an article about Joe Bidden and his influence in the stuttering community. You can find it at http://www.isastutter.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/OV38.pdf
We also talked about how to advertise to people with whom you always talk on the phone, especially at work where one might work with a team of people located in different parts of the world. Some suggestions were:
- I sometimes stutter and block and it might feel like silence but it is not a problem with the phone or the connection. It’s me needing some time to get the words out.
- Ask everyone to introduce each other and share a strength and a “weakness”, or something not well known about oneself.
And speaking about advertising, would you wear a t-shirt that says “I stutter” or something similar that would advertise stuttering in some other way (NSA, ISA, etc.)? We had a lot of opinions about this around the room. For some it would be fine and would use it to encourage converstion, others thought that it would invite judgement. It would also depend on what it said and how prominently displayed it was, whether it was in the front or in the back, large or small. What would you do?